Category: Backchannel

As a company, Meetup has long embraced its position as a small, mission-driven operation. While other social software companies from the Web 2.0 era, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, focused on keeping their users on their sites for as long as possible, Meetup’s purpose was always to get people off the internet. By connecting peopleRead More

There’s truth in the stereotype that immigrants often get handed jobs others would avoid like the plague. For most of his career, Dara Khosrowshahi, who came to the United States from Iran when he was nine, didn’t fit that category. Then came his most recent job: On August 28, 2017, he became the CEO ofRead More

The immigrant entrepreneur’s road to Silicon Valley is paved with visas. And every one tells a tale. In the case of Purva Gupta, who is now the 29-year-old founder of Lily, a Palo Alto-based startup that’s building an AI-driven fashion app, the precious US government documents weave a kind of personal epic. In the shortRead More

It’s not Tracie Reeves’s thick Tennessee twang that hooks viewers into the two-hour-long shows she broadcasts via Facebook Live, six times a week. “I don’t know how they listen to my voice,” Reeves confides. “I’ve tried to watch the videos back. Can’t do it. I’m absolutely one of the most annoying people that I’ve everRead More

Anthony Levandowski makes an unlikely prophet. Dressed Silicon Valley-casual in jeans and flanked by a PR rep rather than cloaked acolytes, the engineer known for self-driving cars—and triggering a notorious lawsuit—could be unveiling his latest startup instead of laying the foundations for a new religion. But he is doing just that. Artificial intelligence has alreadyRead More

The video “‘70 youths of African appearance’ rampage through Fair etc etc etc” opens with a graphic of a bearded man in sunglasses with a cigar hanging out of his mouth. A name flashes on screen: Colin Flaherty. Flaherty is a prolific YouTuber and writer who chronicles violence by African Americans, which, he claims, isRead More

For five hours this past spring, Hugo Van Vuuren thought that, just maybe, things were going to turn out okay after all. On that crisp March morning, the tall entrepreneur climbed the steps of Boston’s imposing John F. Kennedy Federal Building. He wore a suit, and carried two Starbucks drinks—one for his immigration attorney. AsRead More

When future historians look back on the cult of the Silicon Valley founder, they will set its starting point in the early 2000s. Its end point could be right about now. But wait—aren’t we living through the greatest explosion of entrepreneurial energy in human history, spearheaded by tech companies? Software is eating the world! TheRead More

I took the train from New York to DC to catch a rare triple-header of Congressional proctology; three House and Senate hearings with Facebook, Twitter, and Google are on the table. (By the time you read this, the first one, on Tuesday, will be completed, with two more coming today.) Though each session will likelyRead More

There’s no lack of reports on the ethics of artificial intelligence. But most of them are lightweight—full of platitudes about “public-private partnerships” and bromides about putting people first. They don’t acknowledge the knotty nature of the social dilemmas AI creates, or how tough it will be to untangle them. The new report from the AIRead More